Campus Directory
Marc Blanc
| Title: | Assistant Professor |
| Office: | |
| Phone: | |
| Email: | blanc@sxu.edu |
| Department: | Language and Literature |
Biography
Marc Blanc’s, Ph.D., teaching and research focus on 19th and 20th-century working-class literary movements, particularly those active in the American Midwest. Blanc is interested in the ways in which literary radicals have used regionalism and material textual production to create interracial countercultures. His current book project, “Bleeding Heartland: Interracial Literary Networks in the Radical Midwest,” proposes an underground cultural history of the Midwest centered around the political writings of Lucy Parsons, Sutton Griggs, Langston Hughes, Jack Conroy, and Margaret Walker. In the classroom, Blanc strives to help students analyze their rhetorical environments and imagine new horizons for themselves and their society.
Education
Ph.D. in English and American Literature
Washington University in St. Louis
B.A. in English Language and Literature
Ohio University
Areas of Specialization
- 19th and 20th-century American literature
- African American literature
- Radical social movements and utopianism
- Print culture and textuality studies
- Midwestern regionalism
Certification/Licensure
Graduate Certificate in American Culture Studies, Washington University in St. Louis
Courses Taught
At SXU
- ENGL 220: Advanced Writing
- ENGL 102: Research and Writing
- ENGL 101: Critical Thinking and Writing
At Other Institutions
- ENGL 260: Political Fictions
- ENGL 160: The Multiethnic Midwest
Selected Honors/Awards
- Redefining Doctoral Education Mini Grant, Center for the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis (2025)
- Hertlein-Whitehead Visiting Scholar Award, Pittsburg State University (2024)
- Newberry Library/Midwest Modern Language Association Research Fellowship (2023)
Presentations/Publications/Productions
Articles and Book Chapters
- “The Transatlantic Radicalism of Eric Walrond, Claude McKay, Dorothy West, and W.E.B. Du Bois.” The Cambridge Companion to Fiction of the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Martha Patterson, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.
- “Pioneers and Populists: Sutton E. Griggs, Oscar Micheaux, and Independent Black Publishing at the Turn of the Century.” College Literature, vol. 51, no. 4, special issue “American Literary Institutions around 1900,” edited by Sheila Liming, Alexander Starre, and Florian Sedlmeier, fall 2024, pp. 587-615. Doi: 10.1353/lit.2024.a939756
- “Anvil, the Forgotten Magazine of Heartland Marxism.” Jacobin, 23 Feb. 2025, https://jacobin.com/2025/02/anvil-magazine-midwest-communism-conroy.
Book Reviews
- Workers of All Colors Unite: Race and the Origins of American Socialism by Lorenzo Costaguta. H-Socialisms, H-Net, March 2024. https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=58851.
- To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship by Elizabeth McHenry. Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association (JMMLA), vol. 56, no. 2, fall 2023, pp. 145-149.
Conference Presentations
- “The Little Red Songbook and the Legibility of the Oppressed.” Midwest Modern Language Association, Milwaukee, Wis., “Printed Sounds: Music and Print Cultures of the 20th Century,” Nov. 14-16, 2025.
- “Sacco and Vanzetti: A Story of the Americanization of the Left.” Modernist Studies Association, Boston, Mass., “The Never-Ending Wrong: The Cultural Legacies of Sacco and Vanzetti at 100,” Oct. 9-12, 2025.
- “Gateways and Borderlands: Teaching Writing and Rhetoric in a Divided St. Louis,” with Ryan Prewitt. Modern Language Association, New Orleans, LA, “Teaching the Rust Belt: How Emplaced Humanities Practices Can Re-Envision the Rust Belt,” Jan. 9-12, 2025.
- Co-organizer, “Aestheticizing Politics/Politicizing Aesthetics: The St. Louis Symposium on Radicalism in U.S. Arts.” St. Louis Public Library, August 23-24, 2024.